


lonely voices talking to me

by ceruleancats



Series: we will always end up here [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Archivist Sasha James, Archivist!Sasha, Cigarettes, Gen, Lonely!Jon, Power Swap, basically an alternate s3 where jon is one of the avatars the archivist chats with, slightly more than canon-typical jon's grandmother sucks, title from fire by barns courtney
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 12:27:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24849763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceruleancats/pseuds/ceruleancats
Summary: Head Archivist Sasha James has a chat with a terribly lonely man.
Series: we will always end up here [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1807591
Comments: 23
Kudos: 217





	lonely voices talking to me

**Author's Note:**

> This is a standalone part of an Archivist!Sasha AU that will hopefully be bigger/longer at some point. You don't have to read the first part of the series at all to understand what's going on (just think: equivalent of Jon talking to Jude Perry at the beginning of s3). 
> 
> Enjoy and lmk if ya liked it!

There is something very strange about the man on the bench. 

He looks normal enough. Sasha would ordinarily dismiss him as an office worker or maybe a professor on break, with his tousled, gray-streaked hair and dark eyebags, the elbow-patched jacket and neat slacks and thousand-yard stare, if it wasn’t for the smoke. He has a cigarette dangling from his fingers, and the smoke curling from it just...isn’t dissipating. It wreaths around him like a living thing, white wisps ebbing and flowing. 

And then she realizes that the park around her has gone oddly silent, all the distant car horns, birds chirping and beating their wings, the footsteps and quiet chatter of passersby—in fact, now that she’s looking around, every single person in the park seems to have vanished. Everyone but her and the man on the bench.

Well. This isn’t ominous at all. 

Sasha takes a deep breath and steels herself. She is getting to the bottom of this if it kills her (and she’s trying not to think too hard about the increasing probability of that being the case), and this spooky smoker man is going to help whether he wants to or not.

Thus pep-talked, Sasha marches up to the man on the bench. “Hello,” she says politely, staying a few steps back to avoid breathing in the whorls of smoke that continue to dance around him. 

The man, who either ignored her approach or hasn’t noticed her until now, blinks at her. “Hello,” he returns, in an almost obnoxiously posh accent that _has_ to be fake and a tone of voice that seems to suggest he would really rather not be having this interaction. 

Sasha waits for him to add anything, but it’s rapidly becoming clear that she is going to be the one doing the legwork for any kind of conversation they might have. 

“My name is Sasha James. I’m from the Magnus Institute, and I was wondering if you might be willing to give a statement?” She smiles at him hopefully.

The man sighs deeply, putting his cigarette out on the arm of the bench and flicking it to the ground, where it smolders gently. Sasha resists the urge to criticize him for littering. 

“If I give you a statement, Archivist, will you leave me alone afterward?” he says dryly, raising an eyebrow at her and quirking his lips like he’s telling some kind of private joke. He doesn’t seem to want to immediately murder her for being from the Institute, which is a good sign. But it’s still so strange to have her reputation, or at least her job title (though it so clearly means something _more_ ), precede her.

“...Sure,” Sasha says slowly. It’s a fair enough deal. She digs in her bag for the tape recorder and tilts her head towards the bench. “Mind if I..?”

“If you insist,” the man says, sounding unnecessarily put-upon, but he slides over to make space for her. 

Sasha sits down, trying to breathe through her mouth to avoid smelling the stink of the smoke that’s still swirling around the man. He must notice her discomfort, because he says, “Ah,” and waves a hand in sort of a shooing motion, and the smoke dissolves into nothing. 

“Thanks,” Sasha says, meaning it, and places the recorder on the bench between them, hitting the record button. “So, statement of…”

The man stays quiet for a second. In the utter silence of the park around them, the hum of the recorder seems almost deafening. 

“Jon,” he says finally. Sasha would prompt him for a surname if she thought it would do anything, but she’s getting the feeling taking this statement is going to be like pulling teeth, and this is not the hill she wants to die on. 

“Alright. Statement of Jon, no last name, regarding?”

“My...childhood,” he says, somewhat reluctantly.

“Recorded direct from subject, April 24th, 2017.” 

“I was always somewhat of a...lonely child,” he begins, with another wry twist of his lips. “I hardly knew my parents; they died in unrelated accidents when I was very young. A lonely orphan—cliche, I know. My grandmother took me in, but it was always obvious it was out of a sense of obligation to my father, not out of any love she might have harbored for a grandchild. In fact, I believe one of the major reasons she disliked me so much was she resented the fact that not only had her beloved son died, but she now had to raise _another_ child she’d never asked for. 

“I don’t think I have to explain in detail how constant reminders on how much of a _burden_ one is can affect adolescent development. To be fair, I’m sure I was a deeply annoying child, which is part of why I never had any childhood friends, or whatnot.” He says “friends” like it’s a dirty word and rolls his eyes, and Sasha feels pity bloom in her chest beneath the dissociative haze of statement-taking. 

“I was more interested in reading books, the one luxury my grandmother allowed me, mainly nonfiction, because fiction was always so obviously fake. Characters like cardboard cutouts, with their loving families and friends—well, let us simply say that was not something I could generally relate to. But nonfiction served me well, and I could escape into facts and figures easier than any fantasy story. When I wasn’t reading, I did a lot of staring out of my bedroom window. Looking at the rest of the houses on the street, peeking in on playdates and family dinners and such, and telling myself how useless and fake it all was. People didn’t actually care. I read enough psychology texts to know that, underneath it all, everyone is just looking out for number one. Everything else is simply a charade. 

“I was still young, eight or nine, when I felt the...embrace of my patron for the first time. My grandmother had dragged me to the funeral of one of her friends. Everyone kept saying how much they _loved_ the dead woman and _missed_ her and how much she _meant_ to them, and a wave of disgust at the _sham_ of it all washed over me, and suddenly all of their painted tearstained faces were gone, and I was away from it all. Just me, and the silent curl of smoke from some grieving relative’s cigarette.

“They came back eventually. Well. Almost all of them. But afterwards, I could control it. My grandmother finally died when I was in university, and now I’m truly, blissfully alone.”

Jon frowns as Sasha surfaces from the statement haze, shaking her head to clear it. “Hm. That was considerably more than I meant to say. I suppose I should have expected as much, with an Archivist.” At some point during the statement, he must have lit another cigarette, because he’s holding one lightly between his fingers, and smoke has begun to twine around his arm like an affectionate cat. 

“Why does everyone keep calling me that?” Sasha blurts out. It comes out more plaintively than she means it to, but she soldiers on. “It’s just my position at the Institute. I gave you my name.” 

Jon’s eyebrows rise so high they almost disappear into his hairline. “You must know. That’s practically your entire job.” 

Sasha sighs. “Okay, fine, I know it has something to do with my...patron, as you put it. But the man who was explaining it to me died before he could really get into the gory details. And it seems like you know more.”

Jon glances over at her, appraisingly. Takes a drag on his cigarette and lets the smoke float out across the still-empty park. “If you don’t know, I don’t think...certain individuals would want me to spoil it for you. I can give you a bit of advice, though.”

Sasha resists the urge to roll her eyes. But whatever, anything is better than nothing with this, right? She nods for him to continue.

“Some people can pretend to care very, very well. But the truth of it is always there, if you know where to look. It’s the eyes, Sasha,” he says, staring intently into hers. It feels like he’s trying to tell her something beyond his edgy “nobody actually cares about anybody else” shtick, but she can’t quite decode it.

And then, between one blink and the next, his piercing stare is gone. The hustle and bustle of the park comes roaring back, and her ears almost ring with the sudden change in volume. 

She looks down at the recorder on the bench. Next to it, tip glowing faintly and leaking a thin stream of gray into the air, is Jon’s cigarette.

Sasha sighs, deep and long. Damn that litterer; there’s literally a garbage can with one of those ashtrays on top a few meters away from the bench. 

“End recording,” she says, and then presses the stop button on the recorder. She puts the cigarette out carefully in the black sand of the ashtray and walks back the way she came, back towards the Institute. She’s thinking about eyes.


End file.
